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By Danielle KuceraBloomberg News • Thursday June 13, 2013 6:26 AM

Sales of George Orwell’s novel
1984, featuring a futuristic totalitarian state, jumped on Amazon.com’s website following
reports of a classified program that lets the U.S. government collect personal data.

One edition of the book, originally published in 1949, moved to No. 3 on Amazon’s Movers &
Shakers list, which tracks dramatic increases in sales volume over a 24-hour period. That made it
the 100th-best-selling book on the site late Tuesday, an increase from its previous rank of
11,855th.

The sales gains come after the revelation of a top-secret electronic-surveillance program that
allows the National Security Agency and the FBI to access data from audio and video chats,
photographs, emails, documents and connection logs from the biggest U.S. Internet companies.
The Washington Post and the British-based
The Guardian reported the program’s existence last week.

Orwell’s novel portrays a dystopian society where individuals are monitored through ubiquitous
television screens and overseen by a leader called Big Brother.

Barnes & Noble has seen a “significant spike in sales recently as government surveillance
and Orwell have been paired in the news,” even though the book is consistently a top seller, said
Patricia Bostelman, vice president of marketing at the bookseller.

One U.S. government program, code-named PRISM, traces its roots to warrantless
domestic-surveillance efforts under former President George W. Bush. The companies include
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo,
The Post report said.